Thursday 28 August 2025
Congratulations to Frances Ogilvie (Year 12, Middlemore) who recently won first prize in the Open Junior New Zealand Poetry Society (NZPS) International Poetry Competition 2025, with her poem Domini Nox Aeterna.
Judge Josiah Morgan was quoted as saying:
"The entire poem builds a case for the relationship between sound and suffering, as 'acoustics crave echoes, not mercy.' The poem gestures in its title toward a lord of the night, but the poem also effectively gestures at the traumas accrued through artistic discipline. 'Pain is my craft. I’ve claimed the chisel.'
I’ve read this poem tens upon tens of times now and it still gives me new things to think about.”
Domini Nox Aeterna
The violin’s bow was horse tendons.
Of course they screamed.
Did you expect cotton? Silk? Dampeners would be a design flaw.
Acoustics crave echoes, not mercy.
”Snap the cello’s neck!”
But… do it pianissimo. Amplify the breakage.
And if you are going to drag – drag me bloody in a drumhead bag.
What good are your stained-glass ribs in the dark?
I’ll hold the sun’s fists till rubies scream onto the pews.
You would rot without me and my fibular baton.
I am not demanding, just wise.
Pain is my craft. I’ve claimed the chisel.
Now bleach the bones. Fret the piano.
This lullaby is not for the child, but to quell the cribs creaking.
Every rest in the score costs the wings of an angel.
So sing until the chalice fills the marrow.
Cut their throats.
… In perfect harmony.
Wind each larynx—metronome clicking broken teeth.
”Finally you have learnt.”
Your nephrons hold the antiphon
Not sin, not salvation
but my double stranded Gloria.
Domini Nox Aeterna.
By Frances Ogilvie.